Setting up coding standards for Drupal 8, 9 using phpcs

It is an important part of any framework or a language to maintain good coding standards.

Today we’ll see how to set it up for Drupal using phpcs.

You can pick and choose a variety of helper modules to achieve this task, but I find it fairly easy to use Coder.

Step 1

Install Coder to your project

composer require --dev drupal/coder

Step 2

Make sure coder has been downloaded into vendor directory

Type in vendor/bin/phpcs -i from your console to verify.

You can also verify the phpcs file at vendor/bin/phpcs directory

Step 3

Now that we know phpcs is working, we need to tell it to use Drupal coding standard checks instead of generic checks.

Download https://github.com/drupal-up/drupal_phpcs/blob/master/phpcs.xml file to your project's root.

Step 4

To properly make use of this file we need to make a few adjustments.

If you open up this file you can see that there is an element named <file> where we can set the folders we want to get checked.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ruleset name="phpcs-standard">
  <description>Codestyle ruleset for Drupal</description>

  <!-- Specify standards. -->
  <rule ref="Drupal"/>
  <rule ref="DrupalPractice"/>

  <!-- Include path with the Drupal and DrupalPractice rules. -->
  <config name="installed_paths" value="vendor/drupal/coder/coder_sniffer"/>

  <!-- Set ignore extensions. -->
  <!-- @todo remove .css to check also the css files. -->
  <!-- @see https://www.drupal.org/node/2867601#comment-12075633 -->
  <arg name="ignore" value="*.css,*.md,*.txt"/>

  <!-- Specify folders. -->
  <file>modules/contrib/shopify_buy_button</file>
  <!-- <file>themes/custom</file> -->
</ruleset>

Set your directories there, for this example I’ve chosen modules/contrib/shopify_buy_button module path by providing;

<file>modules/contrib/shopify_buy_button</file>

Step 5

Because we have defined the paths from the phpcs.xml file where we want to check for coding standards, we can simply execute vendor/bin/phpcs

You can also give additional arguments to this command if you choose to do so. vendor/bin/phpcs — help will show you the accepted arguments.

Step 6

You can manually or automatically fix the issues given by Code-Sniffer.

To automatically fix them, simply execute vendor/bin/phpcbf

That’s all to it !

Resources

https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/standards/coding-standards#helpermod

https://www.drupal.org/docs/contributed-modules/code-review-module/installing-coder-sniffer

https://packagist.org/packages/drupal/coder